TREASURING THE DEEP

Gary Ellis never knows what he will find when he scuba dives on shipwrecks off the Indiana shoreline of Lake Michigan.

It may be a merchant schooner that capsized 100 years ago. It might be a sunken grain barge. Or it could well be a submerged personal insult.

''I`ve gone down two or three times and found that someone has etched references to my heredity-and even to my mom-in the side of a wreck or in the bottom silt. Sometimes they leave whole limericks,'' said Ellis, Indiana state archeologist.

''I`ve even sucked in water accidentally because I was laughing at them.''

The underwater invective was no doubt inscribed by certain sports divers striving to plunder what Ellis is sworn to preserve and protect: shipwrecks off the Indiana shore.

War is being waged in the depths of Lake Michigan and the other Great Lakes.

Historians have estimated that 6,000 vessels lie at the bottom of the Great Lakes, offering a maritime history contained in the wrecks of schooners, brigs, barks, ketches, whalebacks, freighters, scows, tugs, yachts and other sunken crafts.

And off the shores of Illinois, Indiana, Michigan and Wisconsin, plunderers and preservationists are tugging at each other`s diving masks over the sunken wrecks, which constitute one man`s vision of history and another guy`s idea of a cheap way to decorate his rumpus room.

''We have had a lot of sites picked clean, and they have used everything from dynamite to tow trucks,'' said David Cooper, acting underwater archeologist for the State of Wisconsin.

''There is a very small percentage of the dive community who resent any sort of state preservation or involvement. They don`t see this as a public resource, they see it as a personal playground. I resent that attitude.''

In one of the bolder wreck raids on the Great Lakes in recent years, a group of Michigan divers tried in 1984 to clandestinely raise and remove an 1891 shipwreck, the J.D. Marshall, from Indiana waters, Ellis said. They employed several tugboats and two work barges to lift the 155-foot-long lumber vessel from the lake bottom.

''They were going to carve it up and basically make coffee tables,''

Ellis said.

The plunderers raised the ship, but in their greedy haste to cut off its propeller with a torch, they unbalanced the load and the ship plunged back into the deep, nearly taking several divers with it, Ellis recounted.

State officials were tipped off by sports divers who thought that stealing an entire ship was taking maritime souvenir collection a bit too far, Ellis said. The officials arrived after the J.D. Marshall had returned to the bottom, somewhat the worse for wear, and confiscated the salvage vessels. The plunderers, according to Ellis, said they had the right to make money off any shipwreck they found.

''We thought differently,'' he said.

No charges were brought against them, however. Their vessels, which were leased, were returned to their owners.

''We realized that there is no way in the world we could protect these wrecks without an inventory program and some kind of cooperation with the sports-diving community.''

The battle between ''wreck rapers'' and wreck protectors over submerged history is long-running and well known to anyone who ever has hung out at a dive shop or scuba-diving club in the Chicago area, which has an estimated 10,000 commercial and sports divers.

But passage of the U.S. Abandoned Shipwrecks Act in April heightened tension last summer by giving states the right to say who goes down where and on what wreck and whether they can bring anything back up other than their empty tanks and bottom muck.

The prospect of running into government regulations at 40 feet below the waves of Lake Michigan does not sit well with some segments of the diving set, many of whom were potty-trained during ''Seahunt,'' first-kissed at the height of ''Thunderball'' and annointed into manhood in the reflected glory of treasure-hunting hero Mel Fisher of Key West.

This defiant bunch views the deep as their personal treasure trove, preservationists said, and a great deal of the state`s maritime history has been shanghaied for use as picture frames and basement barroom bric-a-brac.

But it is not just the macho ''Divers Do It Deeper'' crowd claiming the right to plunder. Experienced professional divers disagree with the government`s efforts to ban the taking of booty.

Harry Zych, president of American Diving and Salvage in Chicago, thinks very little is worth protecting at lake bottom. He likened the collecting of souvenirs off wrecks to picking up seashells on the beach.

''I don`t feel wrecks should be stripped, but I don`t think there is anything down there worth waging war over,'' said Zych, who hunts shipwrecks as a hobby.

Barry Roth, manager of Chicago Scuba Shoppe, 1015 W. Armitage Ave., said he wants to see wrecks preserved so all divers can enjoy them, but he fears that the state will place too many restrictions on divers under the new regulations.

''I have heard horror stories in other states of boats being confiscated and charters being pulled because guys dove on the wrong wreck,'' he said.

''Most of the wrecks in Lake Michigan have been picked over, and what hasn`t been picked over will be destroyed sooner or later by the water action in the lake.''

The shipwreck act was passed by Congress despite the protests of high-powered treasure hunters such as Mel Fisher, who discovered the gold- and silver-laden Spanish galleon Nuestra Senora de Atocha off Key West. Fisher`s lawyer, David Paul Horan, attended every legislative hearing on the bill, arguing that it would remove financial incentives that keep private salvors on the waters.

If the government is going to get all or most of the treasure, why would any serious treasure hunter spend time and money hunting it? Horan asked.

''The private salvors have done a better job of archeology and documentation than any of the states, because it makes their product

(recovered treasure) worth more,'' the Key West lawyer said.

Though the law was designed to protect primarily those shipwrecks in U.S. coastal waters, it has had a rippling effect upon the generally less spectacular but more accessible shipwrecks in inland lakes and waterways. The law extends protection to wrecks within 70 miles of state shores.

The specific federal guidelines for preserving and protecting wrecks have not been issued. Illinois and the other Great Lakes states are waiting to see what the federal government does before drafting their own policies, said Tom Emerson of the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency.

Most Lake Michigan states have completed or begun taking inventories of wrecks in their waters as a step to regulating wreck divers.

Michigan, far ahead of the other states in protecting its shipwrecks, began in 1980 by creating underwater parks in Lake Michigan, Lake Huron and Lake Superior; seven in all. Michigan`s preservation law, which served as a model for the federal legislation, requires permits to salvage artifacts and contains stiff penalties for looting.

The preserves have created a mini-boom in dive-related tourism in the towns near the wreck sites. Most of these communities form councils to monitor dive sites and the charter dive-boat operators and other businesses they inspire, according to Tom Graf of the state`s bureau of history.

Indiana, Ellis said, has completed the first phase of its inventory, which includes 16 vessels, two of which were ravaged by natural forces. Ellis, who serves only part time as the state`s underwater archeologist, is assisted by conservation officers and volunteer sports divers.

Wisconsin officials say they are interviewing candidates for the new post of state underwater archeologist and have begun to take inventory of the shipwrecks in its waters.

Illinois is well behind other Lake Michigan states, but its Historic Preservation Agency has provided a $3,000 grant to the Chicago Maritime Society to fund efforts to have one wreck, the David Dows, placed under the protective arms of the National Register of Historic Places.

From the historian`s point of view, there is a great deal preserved and worth preserving in Lake Michigan, said Ted Karamansky, a Loyola University history professor who also is director of programs and education for the Chicago Maritime Society.

''People don`t realize that Chicago was one of the great ports of call in the world and has an illustrious maritime history,'' he said.

In the late 19th Century the number of ships coming in and going out of Chicago was greater than that of New York, San Francisco or New Orleans, though the vessels on the Great Lakes were smaller and made shorter runs, he said.

Chicago was the leading port in the world for grain and lumber and was among the greatest for iron ore and limestone, he said. In the 19th Century the port of Chicago was the Chicago River, instead of Lake Calumet, where it is today. And the city was one big wharf along the river from about Michigan Avenue, south to Bridgeport and north to Goose Island.

At the peak of shipping on the lake in the late 19th Century, about 1,400 merchant vessels were plying Lake Michigan. Most of them were owned by their captains, small operators who arranged for the cargoes themselves, the historian said.

One of those ships, the David Dows, is the focus of the Chicago Maritime Society`s first preservation effort. Society members hope to have the wreck placed under the protection of the National Registry of Historic Places.

But some segments of the city`s dive community think the Dows is a poor choice because it has been ravaged by man and nature.

The Dows was built in 1881 as a five-masted schooner, the largest ever constructed for Lake Michigan, with a crew of 8 to 10 and lots of state-of-the-art, steam-operated equipment.

Karamansky speculated that grain merchants from the Toledo Board of Trade built the Dows with hope of cornering the grain market at a time when small shipping companies were being bought and consolidated by industrial giants.

The Dows was so big that when fully loaded, it would not fit into any of the Great Lakes harbors of that day. The owners apparently had hoped the harbors would be dredged for their ship, but they weren`t. ''In that sense, their gamble on such a large boat produced a white elephant,'' the historian said.

This unwieldy vessel was involved in two serious wrecks before its fatal and final plunge and had earned the reputation as a bad-luck ship, Karamansky said. Even before it was completed, it had to be scuttled, and then raised and finished, because of a river flood in Toledo.

The Dows was still a bad-luck ship, even after it sank. The Army Corps of Engineers dynamited a portion of the ship years ago because the upper portions stuck out of the water and posed a hazard to navigation about seven miles off Calumet Harbor where it had become waterlogged and sank in 1889.

Despite the Dows` hard-luck history, the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency and the Chicago Maritime Society decided to make it their first preservation project because of its significance as the only five-masted schooner made for the Great Lakes.

The state anted up a $3,000 grant to help divers survey and photograph the wreck site. Kurt Anderson, a certified public accountant, hobby diver and board member of the maritime society has been heading up the dive project for the last two summers with assistance from volunteers.

Anderson and his crew have made nearly 20 dives on the wreck, which is 30 to 40 feet down. They are developing a site plan and a map to submit to the historic register while others are preparing documentation, videos and models. Anderson admits that the Dows is not the ideal candidate for preservation, and ''it is not in very good shape.''

The battle lines in the war between the preservationists and the plunderers often are as murky as the depths of Lake Michigan. One group of local diving enthusiasts, for example, has found itself at odds with those who want free pickings and those who want to wrap the wrecks in protective shrouds.

Last year commercial divers Taras Lyssenko and Keith Pearson discovered the wreck of the Wings of the Wind schooner, which went down in Lake Michigan in 1866.

The two divers, who often discover shipwrecks in the course of their salvage work, took a few friends to the wreck site, and word quickly got around the well-connected diving community.

By the time the two divers returned to photograph their discovery a week or two later, it had been picked clean.

''It was stripped,'' said Lyssenko, 28, of Berwyn. ''It was really disheartening. They took every piece of hardware off the boat, anything that you could get off of it with a crowbar or a hacksaw.''

Lyssenko and his friends learned their lesson. Recently, after discovering three more ''very interesting'' and well-preserved shipwrecks in Lake Michigan, they are willing to put on a little show but no tell.

''We`re not going to give anyone the locations of these wrecks until there is an archeologist standing there to take responsibility for

preservation,'' Lyssenko said.

''There are five charter dive boats on the lake, and when they find out where the wrecks are they take their divers out to them. They are like sharks,'' he said. ''It`s not that these guys are malicious, they just want proof that they dived on a wreck, and it doesn`t take them long to tear one apart.''

Lyssenko and friends said they have located the wrecks of the Wells Burt, a three-masted schooner that sank in 1883; the David Wells, another schooner that went down with a cargo of iron ore in 1880; and the Rotarian, a sidewheel steamship turned restaurant bar known as the Walter J. Powers Fish and Chop House.

The Rotarian, known as an illegal ''taxi-dancing joint,'' was hauled off and deep-sixed in the lake in 1931 after several questionable fires, one of which sent it to the bottom of the Chicago River.

Though the general location of these wrecks is well known, the exact sites are not. The Wells Burt wreckage is particularly well preserved and worthy of protection from the plunderers, Lyssenko said.

''We`ve never seen a ship as intact as the Wells Burt in this area,'' he said. ''It is one of the finest shipwrecks we`ve ever seen.''

News accounts of the sinking of the Wells Burt in May 28, 1883, said that it went down with 11 men in a gale and that it had been carrying a vast cargo of coal.

There was evidence that the crew members had tried to cut down the masts in a desparate effort to save the ship in the fierce winds.

Lyssenko and his friends tantalized the Chicago Maritime Society with a videotape of the Wells Burt site but refused to provide specifics on where she lies until the society comes up with a plan for preserving it.

The society is putting together a proposal for an exhibit on the Wells Burt, Anderson said.

''We can`t tell them until a plan to protect the wreck is in place, because if you tell one person, pretty soon word gets around and the wreck is picked clean,'' Lyssenko said.